Alexandre Koyré, 'The Political Function of the Modern Lie ...

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A. Paul Weber, Das Gerücht (The Rumour), 1943 As the classic lithograph by A. Paul Weber, „Das Gerücht (The Rumour)‟ suggested, the real trouble with unchecked messages is that in the age of communicative abundance lies can quickly grow long legs and long tails. Thanks to „cybercascades‟ (Cass Sunstein), which regularly happen under conditions of media saturation, keeping lids on wilful and half-intended distortions often proves difficult. Whether or not there is any substance in the claim made by critics of digital natives that they are losing their sense of time and place, and perforce that they are losing their ability to make intelligent judgements, I cannot discuss here; whether, in other words, communicative abundance destroys the capacity for intelligent, modular and canny citizenship and instead nurtures compressed and degraded characters whose incomprehensible disjointedness comes (say) straight out of Samuel Beckett‟s The Unnamable (1953), I leave as an open question for discussion. My simpler point is only that the age of monitory democracy is bedevilled by the political danger that „small‟ lies can grow into whoppers and that sometimes this really matters, as when reputable newspapers like the Washington Post published no fewer than 18 editorials in favour of the view that WMD existed; or when (according to the Pew Research Center [August 19, 2010]) nearly half of American Republicans today believe that Obama is a Muslim, over a quarter doubt that he is a citizen, and fully half, again falsely, believe that the massive bailout of banks and insurance companies was enacted by Obama, not by President Bush. 14
There is one other form of lying for which „churnalism‟, in both its professional and citizen forms, is responsible. I call it no earth news. Australian journalism, with its obsession to bend everything back to an imaginary „Australia‟, is riddled with such news. It could be called the narration of public silence, or perhaps malevolent silence, since it takes the form of important events and processes which journalists around the world deliberately fail to take an interest in, or to tell. They choose a sub-form of lying, wilful ignorance. They choose not to take an interest in saying what is so - they lie from a distance, so to speak - and they do so in no small measure because such subjects as the global surge in poverty, efforts to build cross-border institutions, the arms trade and leveraging in the banking and credit sectors are highly complicated and perforce require intensive concentration, language skills and in-depth research to cover thoroughly, or to cover well. They simply don‟t bother. They conspire in taciturnity tinged with ignorance - deliberately crafted hush about the wider world upon whose push-pull dynamics the lives of millions of citizens dangle. Truth That is enough for the moment about democracy and lying. I want now to turn to the vexed question of the meaning of lying, and its binary opposite, veracity. Truth and lying are relational terms. Yet what is the difference between them? Is the distinction still plausible? If so, how are we to speak of truth in an age when naïve conceptions of veracity and „objectivity‟ have been picked and pulled apart by such disparate developments as the disconnection of religious authority and science, the linguistic turn in philosophy and the multiplication of representatives under conditions of monitory democracy? To put things in a slightly more precise, if abstract way: if truth (as I shall suggest) has a history and if today it is the name we give to statements governed by rules which define what we mean when we speak of truth, even when we wilfully go against it, that is, tell lies, surely that implies that truth and its binary opposite lying have no ultimate foundations unburdened by the contingencies of time and space? And if that is so then doesn‟t that imply that the act of telling lies, wilfully saying what is not so, can go on the rampage, unconstrained by its other half, the objectivity of truth? 15
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Page 19 and 20: Here I come to the third and final
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Alexandre Koyré, 'The Political Function of the Modern Lie ...

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